Dallas Shot Me Up Full of Lead But I Never Been Shot: Environmental Injustice 2024

This is a story of a young boy growing up in West Dallas. My parents, Jack and Robbie, had eleven kids. We grew up just as poor as the rest of the people in West Dallas. In 1956, we lived in a two-bedroom house, and I was the ninth child. Family time was wonderful, joyful, and hard. But the joy of having a big family was what we needed to make it through the sixties through the eighties. When I was six years old, I could not start school because my birthday was twenty-four days after school started, so I had to go to day care another year. While there, every day at twelve noon, I would hear Dr. Martin Luther King speaking on the radio station and was mesmerized by his words. He talked about equal rights. One day, my mother took us on the bus, paid, and walked to the back of the bus. When I questioned her about why we had to sit in the back of the bus, she hit me so hard that I never asked that question again! A year later, I started school, which was the same time they were integrating schools. We were the first black kids to attend Amelia Earhart Elementary, the same year someone killed the president in downtown Dallas. The president was killed in Dallas the same way people in Dallas are killed year after year?lead poisoning. It was the same way in our front yard; nothing would grow. It was dead.